When Pricing Has No Anchor

There is a category of things in this world that have no market price. Not because they have no value, on the contrary. But because their value is entirely in the eye of the beholder. And when two people sit across from each other to agree on a number, neither of them really knows where to start. I know this feeling well. I've been there more times than I can count. I am a sound designer.

A photograph or a sound recording, sitting in an archive has already cost the creator everything it will ever cost: the trip, the equipment, the hours, the talent. What it is worth now is genuinely unknown. If no one ever needs it, it was worth nothing. If the right art director finds it, the one who has been searching for exactly that mood, that moment, it could be the centrepiece of a campaign worth millions. The same asset. Two completely different valuations. Both of them perfectly legitimate.

This is the situation that standard negotiation was never really designed for.

The Old Ritual, Missing Its Ruler

When you haggle over a used car, both sides can look up the going rate. There is friction, there might be some ritual, but there is a reference point underneath it all. The bluffing happens within a range that both parties roughly know exists.

But try pricing a music track for a film. Or a logo for a startup. Or a domain name that someone registered ten years ago as a hobby, and a company now needs for their rebrand. Or a piece of artwork a brand wants to license for a product line.

In all of these cases, neither side really knows where the other stands. The seller has no idea what the buyer is willing to pay. The buyer has no idea what the seller would genuinely accept. And unlike a second-hand car, there is no reference point to fall back on: no catalogue, no comparable sale, no going rate. Just two private valuations, held in secret. The gap could be enormous, or it could be almost nothing. No one really knows. The artist might be sitting on a number far higher than what the buyer had in mind. Or the opposite. And no one wants to be the first to find out.

The Budget You Can't See

Search for "how to price photography licensing" and you will find hundreds of articles, forums, and calculators. They all offer formulas. Day rates multiplied by usage factors. Geographic reach times duration. Editorial versus commercial. Print versus digital. The math can get very sophisticated.

But here is what none of those articles say out loud: even with a perfect formula, you still don't know the client's budget. And the client, on their side, has no idea what you would actually accept. The formula gives the photographer confidence to name a number. It does not solve the fundamental problem, which is that two people are negotiating in the dark.

The same is true for music licensing: a composer wondering what to charge a filmmaker for the right to use a track. For illustration and graphic design: a freelancer quoting a logo to a client who has been given a budget they will never reveal. For art licensing: an artist deciding what to charge for the right to print their work on a product line. For domain names: a seller who registered one casually years ago, now facing a buyer who needs it badly but will never admit how badly.

In each of these situations, the gap between what the seller would genuinely accept and what the buyer is genuinely willing to pay can be enormous. And because neither side reveals their honest boundary, deals settle far from what would have been fair, or drag on for weeks of back-and-forth that exhausts everyone and may even damage the relationship before it has even properly begun.

The Cost of Not Knowing

I know that feeling well. You send the quote for the usage rights of a given asset, close the laptop, and spend the next hour second-guessing yourself. Was that too much? Was it embarrassingly low for the client? Did I just devalue years of work with a single number? Or did I lose the job simply because I pitched too high to someone who never had the budget in the first place? You never really find out.

That uncertainty is the real frustration of negotiating intangible goods. With a second-hand car, you can always come down on the price: the market justifies the revision. But with creative work, lowering your quote after the fact is a much more delicate move. Because your price was never anchored to anything external. It came from you. And if you revise it downward, you are undermining the very value you just asked someone to believe in.

Some deals happen at the wrong price, leaving one side resentful, and it is most often the content creator. FreshBooks, a service that processes millions of freelancer invoices worldwide, has repeatedly pointed to the same pattern: when budgets stay hidden and there is no clear market reference, many creatives end up underpricing their work.

A Fair Price Without a Market

The solution is not better guessing. It is not more research, more rate surveys, or more courage to ask what the client has budgeted. The solution is a structure: a neutral middleman that collects both best offers in secret, holds them without revealing either one, and only then brings them together. Not a catalog, not a market rate, not an average of what others charge. Just the two honest boundaries of this specific deal, between these two specific people, for this specific piece of work that has never existed before and will never exist again. Once you have those two numbers, the seller's true minimum and the buyer's true ceiling, the question becomes a simple one: what is the fairest point between them?

I looked for that tool for a long time. As a sound designer, I needed exactly this. Something that would take the game out of a negotiation. Something that would let both sides be honest without either one going first. I never found it (or rather, I found one but locked behind an account creation and a paywall, with a computation that hardly works). So I built my own. Free, open, and transparent. And since transparency is the whole point, let me show you exactly how it works.

Meet BidWix

Two people submit their honest number, the seller's true minimum and the buyer's true ceiling, each without seeing the other's. If there is no overlap, there is no deal, and both sides find out quickly. If there is overlap, a price is calculated. Not the arithmetic mean, not simply splitting the difference, which always favours the side with the lower number, but the geometric mean. The point where both sides made the same proportional gain relative to where they started.

If the seller's minimum was $100 and the buyer's ceiling was $400, the arithmetic mean lands at $250: the seller gained 150% over their floor, while the buyer conceded only 37.5% of their ceiling. Same dollar amount, but wildly different proportional gains. The geometric mean lands at $200 instead, and at that price, both sides gained by exactly the same factor of two. That is what proportional fairness looks like. I wrote about this in more detail in a previous article, if you want to follow the reasoning all the way through.

If you have ever licensed a photograph, quoted a logo, or tried to put a number on a piece of music you made, I am not just writing about you. I'm one of you: a sound designer who has felt that same discomfort, that same fog, more times than I can count. And I got frustrated enough to do something about it, and built a tool I wish had existed twenty years ago. It is called BidWix. No account needed. No paywall. Just two honest numbers, and a fair price that neither side could have reached alone. And now, the tool is yours.

Stéphane

P.S. If this left you thinking being honest still feels risky, I unpack that feeling in When Telling the Truth Feels Like Losing (but it doesn’t).